Cthulhu Mythos by H. P. Lovecraft.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age..” H. P. Lovecraft.

An ongoing theme in Lovecraft’s work is the complete irrelevance of mankind in the face of the cosmic horrors that apparently exist in the universe, with Lovecraft constantly referring to the “Great Old Ones”: a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and who have since fallen into a deathlike sleep. This was first established in The Call of Cthulhu, with the minds of the human characters deteriorating when afforded a glimpse of what exists outside their perceived reality.

The Cthulhu Mythos is a shared fictional universe, based on the work of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Robert M. Price described in his essay “H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos” two stages in the development of the Cthulhu Mythos.

“As Lovecraft conceived the deities or forces of his mythos, there were, initially, the Elder Gods… These Elder Gods were benign deities, representing the forces of good, and existed peacefully…very rarely stirring forth to intervene in the unceasing struggle between the powers of evil and the races of Earth. These powers of evil were variously known as the Great Old Ones or the Ancient Ones…—August Derleth, “The Cthulhu Mythos”

And behold, the prophecy seems fulfilled, for Cthulhu lives on; in the continued and growing recognition of Lovecraft’s work, and in the creations of a new generation of writers inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos. –-Robert Bloch, 1975